Writer & Artist: Malachi Ward
Publisher: Alternative Comics
Release Date: September 15, 2015
Most readers have only encountered this work by Malachi Ward piece by piece. Alternative Comics’ From Now On: Short Comic Tales of the Fantastic has been pieced together from one-offs in such renowned anthologies as Mome, The Best American Comics and a host of less well-known compilations and magazines. Taken individually, the comics are strong work. Together, they make up something much stronger.
All narratives take place in a distant place or time, with characters habituated to time travel, space travel or shape-shifting. “Utu,” the opening story, sets the table. At first, pulling in cinematically on a lone, ponchoed figure walking across a desolate landscape, the tale seems to focus on a “primitive” culture, one versed in shamans and gods, far separated from technology. Prophecy is alive and real. But then it transforms into a more interesting narrative as the reader realizes the protagonist’s his god is a visitor from the future, projecting himself through space and time to try to alter the present through changing the past. Ward has a gift for pulling this kind of sci-fi whatnot down to earth. It’s not really about the clever twist, a la Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” which is a clear inspiration. Instead, it’s about the emotions and human details surrounding the effort of trying to affect change, the exhaustion of getting through the day to day, the way progress has a tendency to derail without failure necessarily being big and dramatic.
